He has frustrated College administrators, irked a few faculty
members, and used his cartoons to skewer the "ridiculous crusades"
of idealogues on both sides of campus debates.

Meet College humorist and satirist James Haynes

Imagine a Wabash man with dye-streaked blond hair, wearing
pants at least four sizes too big, a couple of studded earrings in his left
ear, and scads of kite string wrapped tightly around both wrists as he shuffles
across the Wabash campus. He's on his way to the basement of the Chapel
where each Wednesday night he turns loose his intellectual creativity as
cartoonist and columnist for The Bachelor.

Meet James Haynes '98. Or Jaymz, which is the name he scribbles
in the upper right hand corner of his immensely popular, often scathing,
and always irreverent cartoon, "Loyal Sons." Haynes is many things
to be sure, but the stereotypical Wabash man he is not. And he wouldn't
have it any other way.

"Wabash wasn't entirely the environment I was looking
for in a college," the Farmington Hills, Michigan native claims. "I
didn't see rampant creativity here, but it wasn't stodgy, either."

Haynes' high school career had been anything but stodgy.
He'd done well by any standards and scored nearly perfect "10s"
on the creativity scale. He played bass and sang in a techno band called
"Einstein's Dog." He developed large-scale haunted houses that
earned praise from the Detroit newspapers because of their wild popularity.
He even made a horror film with some friends called The Things in the Woods,
which played to packed houses at local theaters. Oh yes, he and friend Gordon
Eich teamed up to win the world championship of the "Odyssey of the
Mind" competition, for which, as an eighth grader, he earned a spot
on NBC's "Today Show" with host Bryant Gumbel.

All of that creative energy, packed with intellectual muscle,
caught the eye of the Wabash Lilly Awards Committee. Haynes saw it as a
good match.

"I knew that if I came to Wabash, I would have plenty
of room to be creative-in essence, to write my own ticket."

That's exactly what he did. Haynes started writing for
The Bachelor without any previous experience in journalism. His first work
with the paper was as a columnist, writing weekly beer reviews. "I
was the only guy in my fraternity who wasn't involved in varsity sports,"
Haynes remembers. "I wasn't brilliant in class my freshman year, so
I found my niche with The Bachelor. And I found that the great thing about
Wabash is the recognition-from the time I wrote my first article on, I got
feedback and encouragement from professors and students every week."

That column and subsequent work with the College's humor
magazine, Barrickman's Revenge, earned Haynes a "bad boy" image.
It also made him an obvious choice when then-editors John Jefferson '97
and John Deschner '97 needed a student cartoonist for The Bachelor they
were attempting to rebuild.

"They said, 'Haynes, you're funny,' and I said, 'yeah,
but I can't draw!'"

With that action, "Loyal Sons" was born, and
though his characters don't have bodies ("because I can't draw them"),
the messages they send to the College community cut straight to the bone.
"Loyal Sons" has skewered every group on campus-students, administrators,
faculty, and alumni. Mostly, though, the characters of "Loyal Sons"
are the very people of Wabash at their core, and James' depictions of political
and social issues on campus often sting with reality.

"People at Wabash lose sight of the issues and nobody
really wants to compromise to do what's best for the College as a whole,"
he says. "People are in search of a moral or political victory, so
things rapidly become a war of rhetoric and competing politics. We need
to start talking about the issues and stop sloganeering them. The issues
themselves are certainly not stupid, but the way we talk about them is counterproductive.

"If you point these things out publicly, they're taken
as a hostile assault. In cartoons, you can be less hostile, and people can
and do accept criticism in that way . . . No, I never pulled any punches,
but I didn't kick anybody in the balls either."

The Bachelor's Editor-in-Chief Chris Cotterill '99, who
credits Haynes with invigorating the features section of the paper with
his "outlandish wit," says, "the one thing you always knew
about James was that he wasn't about to become a mouthpiece for anyone."

Except, perhaps, for the liberal arts. Haynes 700-word
weekly opinion columns have covered the full range of the Wabash experience.
His tirades have ranged from the difficult task of choosing a major, to
road tripping on Spring Break; from why Honor Scholarship Weekend is so
critically important to the College's future, to the fun of a home football
game; from his frustrations with C&T to campus political squabbles.

"Through his social commentary, James made people
think," Cotterill says.

And he always assumed his readers were thinking.

"The good scholar can learn to differentiate between
the wheat and the chaff, and I would like to believe that Wabash turns out
scholars of this caliber," Haynes wrote this year in one of his columns.
He capped his own Wabash academic career by earning distinction on both
his political science and English comprehensive exams. Now he's trying to
land a job with one of a number of regionally- and nationally-recognized
"underground" newspapers.

At various times during his Wabash tenure, James Haynes
has been called everything from an irreverent punk and campus smartass to
the funniest writer and most insightful wit in the student body. He reflected
on his Wabash experience in his final column-words of wisdom for underclassmen:
"Pull an all-nighter occasionally to keep from getting soft, support
student activities, read something intelligent from time to time, and begin
planning a truly spectacular, end-of-the-millennium heist to get our bell
back from those cretins in Greencastle."

In the end, James Haynes isn't that "different"
than any other Wabash man.